Hill Magick

by Julia French

  Hill Magick

  By

  Julia French

  Credits Page

  Damnation Books, LLC.

  P.O. Box 3931

  Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998

  www.damnationbooks.com

  Hill Magick

  by Julia French

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-989-0

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-990-6

  Cover art by: Dawné Dominique

  Edited by: Wendy Callahan

  Copyright 2013 Julia French

  Printed in the United States of America

  Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights

  Worldwide English Language Print Rights

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  The lopsided loaf of bread arced through the chilly air and landed with a thunk upon the mound of garbage protruding from the overfilled dumpster. A seagull, alerted to the presence of food, circled the dumpster and landed three feet from Rachel, eyeing her aggressively.

  It was done. Mark wouldn’t have a fit of rage because she had accidentally crushed the loaf of bread she had bought at the store. Instead, he would have a fit of rage over her “forgetting” to buy bread in the first place, a lesser fury that would be easier for her to face. It would be a lesser fury because Mark would make a big show of forgiving her forgetfulness, which was laughable since her husband of six years couldn’t remember to pay the paperboy on time.

  Seated in the car, Rachel watched the seagull rip the tan plastic off the bread and dig its sharp beak into the white mass. It devoured the loaf in huge beakfuls, darting suspicious glances upward, searching the gray afternoon sky for other seagulls who might happen along and challenge him for his meal. She watched the bird until the plastic bread wrapper was only an empty skin, which the bird took up in his beak and shook in irritation.

  The hoarse, hollow hoot of a tugboat out in Yarwich Harbor brought Rachel back to reality. She was only delaying the inevitable. She started the engine and pulled slowly out of the parking lot. The bags of groceries shifted in the trunk as she turned onto the street, and she prayed the eggs would stay intact.

  Yarwich Eats, the neon sign said. Yes, it certainly does, Rachel reflected as she slowed for the turn onto Moorland Drive. She’d been a waitress in that greasy spoon restaurant for three years until Mark had come along and rescued her from that drudgery. If only she hadn’t been working that extra shift… If only Mark hadn’t decided to stop there for a quick bite on his way to Roansbury… If only she’d never been born.

  Halfway home Rachel realized that she had used the car radio earlier that day. The muscles in her scalp tight with tension, she reached forward and tuned the channel back to Mark’s favorite station. Really, Rachel, that was a close one, she told herself sternly. There was already the problem of the loaf of bread, and she didn’t need to make more trouble by leaving the radio tuned to the wrong station. Pleasing Mark was the last thing she felt like doing, but their relationship was easier when she went through the motions. He didn’t seem to notice that her heart was no longer in it, or perhaps he no longer cared as long as he got his way.

  Like the seagull, Rachel’s husband imagined enemies all around him, plotting to humiliate him or cheat him out of his just deserts. Some days he acted like even Rachel was his enemy, although she’d tried her hardest to convince him that he could trust her. Rachel pitied him, because living a paranoid existence was its own punishment, but she knew she couldn’t stay with him much longer. Her greatest fear was that one day Mark would hit her with that clenched fist he liked to wave in the air when he “discussed” things with her.

  Fortunately, Mark didn’t notice that she hadn’t brought home any bread. After supper he retreated into the den to read one of his many computer magazines. Now, Rachel figured, would be the right time to do what she had to do.

  She dried the last dish, placed it in the cabinet, and went into the bedroom. Deep inside the walk-in closet was an old cedar chest filled with assorted silk flowers. Underneath the masses of red, purple, and yellow was her precious laptop computer. She had saved the money for it out of her weekly household allowance and had hidden it in a place Mark was not likely to look. Now she drew out the machine from its hiding place and switched it on.

  The computer gurgled happily to itself, and she settled down on the bed and brought up the job listings she had downloaded from the Internet yesterday while Mark was at work.

  Magazine sales, no experience necessary, will train, read the first entry on the list. Good. Rachel didn’t have experience with anything except waitressing. Factory position, heavy lifting required. She made a fist, studied her skinny arm, and continued to the next entry. Trustworthy individuals with team spirit needed. Apply now for restaurant management training. Some travel required. For her, travel was out of the question. Last week when she had cautiously suggested to Mark that she get a part-time job “to keep herself busy” he had blown up at her and had remained angry for the rest of the day. She could go into telephone sales, but her high school best friend’s mother had done it for a living and she had seen that it was a very stressful job. She could become a companion to a shut-in, but the position required nurse’s aid training, which she didn’t have and couldn’t obtain without Mark finding out. The cafeteria server position sounded easy, but to her it seemed too much like waitressing.

  Mark’s heavy footsteps sounded in the hall. Hastily she powered off the laptop. Just as the bedroom door opened she slid the machine under the bed. She could stash the laptop back in the flower chest after he left for work tomorrow morning. Unlike other times when she’d had more warning, this time had been way too close. Was he trying to catch her at something? Had she let something slip? Did he suspect that she was planning to leave?

  At first their relationship had been perfect. Mark had been so loving, so caring, so strong and protective of her. She had fallen in love with the tall, chestnut-haired accountant at once and had accepted his proposal six months after they met. The abuse had started quietly, unobtrusively, with unexpected criticisms that always seemed to happen when she was vulnerable and alone, never when others were around to hear. Mark always insisted he was joking, but with each passing year the steady, slow erosion of his respect for her and his callous disregard of her feelings had grown. His hit-and-run comments about the way she dressed, spoke, acted, cooked, and cleaned the house had morphed into full-out verbal attacks against her. It didn’t seem to matter what she did or didn’t do, how carefully she did the housework, or how kindly and gently she spoke to him. Everything about her seemed to rub him the wrong way—and yet he would sometimes buy her flowers, kiss her, and tell her he loved her. At first she had taken hope from his sporadic acts of kindness, but finally she had realized that Mark didn’t want to change, that he would never change.

  Even with all that she might have decided to stay with him, except that his rages were becoming more unpredictable and more frequent. He had never hit her, but what if one day he decided to? The key to her freedom would be a job that supported her, but she couldn’t have a job unless she had a car to get there. She couldn’t get her own car unless she had a job to pay for it,
and she couldn’t pay for a car unless she had a job.

  Tonight Mark’s mind was on something else before bed, but she didn’t have to pretend very hard because her “headache,” brought on by tension and uncertainty, was quite real. As soon as his head touched the pillow Mark fell into a deep, snoring slumber. Lying uncomfortably in bed beside him, Rachel closed her aching eyes. A vision of the scavenging seagull flashed into her mind, brilliantly clear and detailed. She saw the bird swooping down toward her from the clear blue sky, saw the formidable charcoal-gray beak approach her face. With a sharp, shrieking cry, the seagull rammed its bill deep into her eyeball, and she jerked, shaking the bed. It was 3:00 a.m. before she fell asleep.

  When she woke the next morning Mark had already left for work. He had gotten a ride with their neighbor three doors down, as he sometimes did. The sarcastic note pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet told her that if she bothered to get up before suppertime, she needed to drop off his suits at the dry cleaner.

  It was a beautiful morning. The October sky was a cloudless blue, the air was crisp and bracing, and she had the car to herself for the second day in a row. Feeling less guilty than she knew Mark wanted her to feel, Rachel swung the armful of suits and hangers into the back seat, took a deep breath of fresh air, and let it out slowly. She closed her eyes a moment and let the healing sunshine enter her soul.

  A soft thump on the top of her head brought her back to reality. Patiently she located the little green frog and disentangled the sucker-feet from her hair. The tiny animal lay passively upon the palm of her hand, blinking its tiny golden eyes.

  The city of Yarwich was almost as old as Boston, though not quite as large. Many of the older buildings had been modernized or leveled, but enough of the original architecture remained to give the city a true New England flavor. Even more than the history, however, nothing characterized Yarwich so much as the supernatural oddities which were a part of daily life in that city.

  There was no shortage of theories to explain the unusual frequency of weird occurrences. Some opined that an ancient Indian curse was the cause. Others believed that the buildings in downtown Yarwich had been built over an underground stream that attracted elementals and other spirits to the area, but the only spirits Rachel had seen in Yarwich were inside Roger’s Liquor and Bait Supply.

  When she first moved from her hometown of Roansbury to the city, she had been bewildered and upset by the phenomena which met her at every turn, and only after she’d gotten used to them had she realized that there were logical explanations for most, if not all, of the strange occurrences. For instance, there was nothing at all remarkable about finding a tree frog in her hair. Obviously the animal had climbed onto the roof, balanced on the gutter, and had fallen off at the precise moment that she passed underneath. As she got into the car, a second tree frog hurtled out of nowhere past her ear and bounced on the grass. She pretended not to see it.

  She dropped off the suits at the dry cleaner’s, tucked the claim check into her purse, and emerged onto busy Washington Avenue. As she walked back to the car, she counted off the shops along the street: Melody’s Antiques, Harper Drugs, Wild & Free—which carried black-light posters, cheap pewter jewelry, and silk-screened T-shirts featuring marijuana leaves, Island Curl Polynesian Hairdressers, and the Plum Blossom Restaurant, from which the delicious aroma of sautéed shrimp emanated.

  She loved to walk along this street. She enjoyed the contrast between the old soot-stained buildings with small shops on the first and second floors, and the modern many-storied edifices rising behind the older ones like colored glass fingers. She continued walking down the street, reading the familiar signs that were like old friends: Tooth and Nail Pet Grooming, Spirit of Plaice, a fish store which prided itself on carrying local varieties, and wasn’t that a Help Wanted sign propped up against the inside of the grimy front window of the Yarwich Regular Chronicle?

  What made her think there was anything for her in the dingy office of the small local newspaper, Rachel didn’t know. She couldn’t come to work in an office without Mark finding out, and her only newspaper experience was proofreading the Roansbury church newsletter one time when their regular proofreader had been taken ill. Nevertheless, she went inside. As the door swung open, a faint buzzer sounded deep within the cavern of the office.

  The heavy green curtain separating the back room from the front office was pushed aside, and a heavy-set bald man stepped forward and stuck out his pudgy hand toward her. Uncertain what to say, she took his hand, and he pumped it up and down vigorously, making the belly beneath his stretched white T-shirt quiver. The bald man’s hand was warm, almost hot, and there was a blurry tattoo on his forearm so faded that she couldn’t tell whether it represented a badly done spider or the top of a malformed palm tree.

  “Welcome, young lady! I’m the owner, editor, and publisher of the Yarwich Regular Chronicle. What can I do for you today?”

  “My name is Rachel Jeffries,” she told him. “I saw the sign in your window. I’m looking for a job.”

  “Well, I certainly have one! How fast can you type?”

  So the position was for a typist. “Seventy-five words per minute,” Rachel replied, thinking of her semester at Roansbury Community College.

  “Not bad. Can you talk to people?”

  “Can I talk—?”

  “Are you good with people?” the bald man clarified, and she nodded.

  “I think I am. I mean, yes, I’m good with people.”

  The man laughed. “There’s nothing like a positive attitude.”

  “No, I really am good with people, I love people, but it’s been a while since I worked with the public,” Rachel explained, embarrassed. “I haven’t worked at all in six years.”

  “Are you an axe murderer?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you a drunk or a sociopath? Do you take illegal drugs on a regular basis?”

  “Ummm…no. Thank you for your time.” Rachel made a movement toward the door, and the bald man held up a hand to stop her.

  “Kidding, I’m just kidding! I usually I get a laugh with the axe murderer thing. Please don’t go. The RC really needs a writer. Are you interested?”

  “I don’t know how to write.”

  “Have you ever written a grocery list or an email to a friend? Sure you have. Of course you can write, if you put your mind to it.”

  “I used to have a friend who was a writer. She told me that writing was hard work and that you had to have a lot of courage to stick it out. I don’t feel very courageous, and I’ve never written anything that mattered.”

  “If you’ve never written anything that mattered, how do you know that you can’t do it?”

  The simple logic floored her. How did she know she couldn’t write, if she had never really tried?

  The bald man didn’t wait for an answer. “How about this-you go home and write a column for this week’s RC. Friday noon is our deadline. If it’s any good, you’re hired. If not, at least you’ll know journalism isn’t for you. Do we have a deal, Ms. Jeffries?”

  “We have a deal,” Rachel echoed. “I’ll get you something by Friday. Please call me Rachel.”

  “Great!” The man smiled broadly, exposing his stained teeth. “My name is Donald Waverly, and everyone around here calls me Don instead of Mister Waverly because I don’t get any stinking respect!”

  A skinny, mournful-looking teenager emerged from the back room, the white stick of a lollipop slouching against his lower lip.

  “You called, boss?”

  “Not really. Go sweep something, will you?”

  Without a word, the white stick working in his mouth, the teenager retreated behind the curtain.

  “My nephew,” Don explained. “It’s this or military school. Can’t say this alternative is helping either of us, but my sister insists I
try it.”

  Rachel made a sound of commiseration, then brought the subject back to her new job. “How much does this position pay?”

  “Three hundred and fifty dollars per week to start. If you’re any good it’ll go up-we’ll negotiate that later. If three hundred and fifty dollars sounds like a lot for a column, remember you’re putting in research and travel time in addition to the writing. If you own a computer you can work from home and email it to me by Friday noon. I’d like to have a face-to-face once a month to touch bases, otherwise you can come and go as you please as long as the work gets done. I’d also like you to write a couple extra columns in case you get sick, go on vacation, or quit.”

  “That sounds fair.” Somehow she kept the excitement out of her voice. “What kind of things would you like me to write about?”

  Don hitched his belt up over the T-shirted expanse of his belly. “We’re a small paper, but we have a core of loyal readers. One of the things they like best is Robert’s Ramblings. You’ll be Robert.”

  “I’ll be Robert-?”

  “The column has been written by three different Roberts. The last one was named Frank. You’re the fourth Robert, if you’re good enough, that is.”

  Rachel nodded her understanding. “Why did the last Robert leave?”

  “He took up with a Louisiana girl and moved to New Orleans. He called me from there to give me his retroactive notice. If you ever decide to quit I hope you’ll give me more than five seconds to find someone else.”

  Don swept up an armful of yellowed newspapers from the counter and thrust them at her. “Here you go, read these to get an idea of what I’m looking for. Well, of course you haven’t read the RC before,” he explained as she stood with her arms full of newspapers. “We have one-fifth the circulation of the Yarwich Times-Herald. You were looking for a job and you saw the sign in the window, and I’m okay with that.”